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Influence by Robert Cialdini

modified 2018/11/02

Book notes for “Influence”

Fascinating book, despite having come across many of the concepts before elsewhere, having them all together with relevant studies and anecdotes made it very clear how many short-cuts humans use when making decisions, and how these can lead us wrong when in some cases (including when we trick ourselves with short-cuts such as hyperbolic discounting).

Questions raised:

I read AI to zombies after this, which covers other types of bias

Insights, lessons learnt:

We are a patchwork of evolved hacks. These work in many cases, but also leave us open to manipulation (“influence”) and cause us to make wrong decisions in certain situations. Even knowing about these biases is not protection against them! Humans are not inherantly evil or cold or stupid, they just tend to conform to behaviours that worked historically to maximise fitness. This can give horrifying results (spectator effect) and stupid ones (hyperbolic discounting), but also form the basis of “humanity” (and morality, arguably?). We should accept them and try and engage our concious brain when necessary.

Highlights:

The noted archaeologist Richard Leakey ascribes the essence of what
makes us human to the reciprocity system: “We are human because our
ancestors learned to share their food and their skills in an honored
network of obligation,“9 he says. Cultural anthropologists Lionel Tiger
and Robin Fox view this “web of indebtedness” as a unique adaptive
mechanism of human beings, allowing for the division of labor, the
exchange of diverse forms of goods, the exchange of different services
Loc: 361

Social scientists have determined that we accept inner
responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it
in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such
external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it
won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently,
we won’t feel committed to it. The same is true of a strong threat; it
may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce
long-term commitment. All this has important implications for rearing
children. It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our
children to do the things we want them truly to believe in. Such
pressures will probably produce temporary compliance with our wishes.
However, if we want more than just that, if we want the children to
believe in the correctness of what they have done, if we want them to
continue to perform the desired behavior when we are not present to
apply those outside pressures, then we must somehow arrange for them to
accept inner responsibility for the actions we want them to take. Loc:
1573

Adults facing the child-rearing experience can take a cue from the
Freedman study. Suppose a couple wants to impress upon their daughter
that lying is wrong. A strong, clear threat (“It’s bad to lie, honey; so
if I catch you at it, I’ll cut your tongue out”) might well be effective
when the parents are present or when the girl thinks she can be
discovered. But it will not achieve the larger goal of convincing her
that she does not want to lie because she thinks it’s wrong. To do that,
a much subtler approach is required. A reason must be given that is just
strong enough to get her to be truthful most of the time but is not so
strong that she sees it as the obvious reason for her truthfulness. Loc:
1620

The important thing is to use a reason that will initially produce the
desired behavior and will, at the same time, allow a child to take
personal responsibility for that behavior. Loc: 1629

The powerful influence of filmed examples in changing the behavior of
children can be used as therapy for various problems. Some striking
evidence is available in the research of psychologist Robert O’Connor on
socially withdrawn preschool children. We have all seen children of this
sort, terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and
groupings of their peers. O’Connor worried that a long-term pattern of
isolation was forming, even at an early age, that would create
persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through
adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O’Connor made a film
containing eleven different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each
scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some ongoing
social activity and then actively joining the activity, to everyone’s
enjoyment. O’Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn
children from four preschools and showed them his film. The impact was
impressive. Loc: 1978

a New York college student who appeared to be having an epileptic
seizure received help 85 percent of the time when there was a single
bystander present but only 31 percent of the time with five bystanders
present. Loc: 2221

In a similar study conducted in Toronto, single bystanders provided
emergency aid 90 percent of the time, whereas such aid occurred in only
16 percent of the cases when a bystander was in the presence of two
other bystanders who remained passive. Loc: 2229

Based on the research findings we have seen, my advice would be to
isolate one individual from the crowd: Stare, speak, and point directly
at that person and no one else: “You, sir, in the blue jacket, I need
help. Call an ambulance.” With that one utterance you should dispel all
the uncertainties that might prevent or delay help. With that one
statement you will have put the man in the blue jacket in the role of
“rescuer.” Loc: 2287

These results suggest an important qualification of the principle of
social proof. We will use the actions of others to decide on proper
behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar
to ourselves. This tendency applies not only to adults but to children
as well. Health researchers have found, for example, that a school-based
antismoking program had lasting effects only when it used same-age peer
leaders as teachers. Another study found that children who saw a film
depicting a child’s positive visit to the dentist lowered their own
dental anxieties principally when they were the same age as the child in
the film. Loc: 2339

Research on elementary-school children shows that adults view aggressive
acts as less naughty when performed by an attractive child and that
teachers presume good-looking children to be more intelligent than their
less-attractive classmates. Loc: 2791

One researcher who examined the sales records of insurance companies
found that customers were more likely to buy insurance when the
salesperson was like them in such areas as age, religion, politics, and
cigarette-smoking habits. Because even small similarities can be
effective in producing a positive response to another and because a
veneer of similarity can be so easily manufactured, I would advise
special caution in the presence of requesters who claim to be “just like
you.” Loc: 2815

\*\* The men in the study received comments about themselves from
another person who needed a favor from them. Some of the men got only
positive comments, some got only negative comments, and some got a
mixture of good and bad. There were three interesting findings. First,
the evaluator who provided only praise was liked best by the men.
Second, this was the case even though the men fully realized that the
flatterer stood to gain from their liking him. Finally, unlike the other
types of comments, pure praise did not have to be accurate to work.
Positive comments produced just as much liking for the flatterer when
they were untrue as when they were true. Loc: 2837

\*\* In one experiment conducted on five classes of Australian college
students, a man was introduced as a visitor from Cambridge University in
England. However, his status at Cambridge was represented differently in
each of the classes. To one class, he was presented as a student; to a
second class, a demonstrator; to another, a lecturer; to yet another, a
senior lecturer; to a fifth, a professor. After he left the room, each
class was asked to estimate his height. It was found that with each
increase in status, the same man grew in perceived height by an average
of a half inch, so that as the “professor” he was seen as two and a half
inches taller than as the “student.” Loc: 3570

The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making.
In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing
something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value. For
instance, homeowners told how much money they could lose from inadequate
insulation are more likely to insulate their homes than those told how
much money they could save. Loc: 3827

A second call involves a sales pitch, Mihaly said. The salesman first
describes the great profits to be made and then tells the customer that
it is no longer possible to invest. The third call gives the customer a
chance to get in on the deal, he said, and is offered with a great deal
of urgency. “The idea is to dangle a carrot in front of the buyer’s face
and then take it away,” Mihaly said. “The aim is to get someone to want
to buy quickly, without thinking too much about it.” Loc: 3892

whenever free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our
freedoms makes us desire them (as well as the goods and services
associated with them) significantly more than previously. So when
increasing scarcity-or anything else-interferes with our prior access to
some item, we will react against the interference by wanting and trying
to possess the item more than before.107 As simple as the kernel of the
theory seems, its shoots and roots curl extensively through much of the
social environment. From the garden of young love to the jungle of armed
revolution to the fruits of the marketplace, impressive amounts of our
behavior can be explained by examining for the tendrils of psychological
reactance. Loc: 3932

One Virginia-based study nicely captured the terrible twos style among
boys who averaged twenty-four months in age. The boys accompanied their
mothers into a room containing two equally attractive toys. The toys
were always arranged so that one stood next to a transparent Plexiglas
barrier and the other stood behind the barrier. For some of the boys,
the Plexiglas sheet was only a foot tall-forming no real barrier to the
toy behind, since the boys could easily reach over the top. For the
other boys, however, the Plexiglas was two feet tall, effectively
blocking the boys’ access to one toy unless they went around the
barrier. The researchers wanted to see how quickly the toddlers would
make contact with the toys under these conditions. Their findings were
clear. When the barrier was too small to restrict access to the toy
behind it, the boys showed no special preference for either of the toys;
on the average, the toy next to the barrier was touched just as quickly
as the one behind. But when the barrier was big enough to be a true
obstacle, the boys went directly to the obstructed toy, making contact
with it three times faster than with the unobstructed toy. In all, the
boys in this study demonstrated the classic terrible twos’ response to a
limitation of their freedom: outright defiance. Loc: 3944

\*\* Perhaps we should be neither surprised nor distressed, then, when
our two-year-olds strain incessantly against our will. They have come to
a recent and exhilarating perspective on themselves as free-standing
human entities. Vital questions of volition, entitlements, and control
now need to be asked and answered within their small minds. The tendency
to fight for every liberty and against every restriction might be best
understood as a quest for information. By testing severely the limits of
their freedoms (and coincidentally, the patience of their parents), the
children are discovering where in their worlds they can expect to be
controlled and where they can expect to be in control. Loc: 3959

\*\* The parent who grants privileges or enforces rules erratically
invites rebelliousness by unwittingly establishing freedoms for the
child. The parent who only sometimes prohibits between-meal sweets may
create for the child the freedom to have such snacks. At that point,
enforcing the rule becomes a much more difficult and explosive matter
because the child is no longer merely lacking a never-possessed right
but is losing an established one. As we have seen in the case of
political freedoms and (especially pertinent to the present discussion)
chocolate-chip cookies, people see a thing as more desirable when it has
recently become less available than when it has been scarce all along.
We should not be surprised, then, when research shows that parents who
enforce discipline inconsistently produce generally rebellious children.
Loc: 4184

Each prospect who was interested enough to want to see the car was given
an appointment time-the same appointment time. So if six people were
scheduled, they were all scheduled for, say, two o’clock that afternoon.
This little device of simultaneous scheduling paved the way for later
compliance because it created an atmosphere of competition for a limited
resource. Loc: 4297